Wednesday, 18 June 2014

The Technics ST-G7 was Technics best tuner of the 1980's (and beyond) and possibly the best Technics tuner ever. Selling for approximately Ј375 GBP in 1984, it was a high-end design costing around 3 times the price of an "ordinary" Technics tuner of the period.

It was a tece soundwise is that there is occasionally a touch of sibilance on vocalshnical tour de force upon launch and Technics engineers really pushed the boat out with this one. The claimed technical specification is superb and so is the subjective performance. I have one of these in my own personal collection and it has just about the lowest noise and least interference of any tuner I have used. Sound quailty is ruthlessly neutral. This is not a tuner that will flatter poor quality compresssed pop music broadcasts but give it a good signal from BBC Radio 2, 3, 4 or Classic FM and it can sound superb. Particularly notable is the extended, powerful bass (when present in source material). It sounds remarkably clean and clear throughout the frequency range. The only criticism I can make soundwise is that there is occasionally a touch of sibilance on vocals

Wednesday, 4 June 2014

The Status SeriesM-02 and C-02 didn't begin their lives as such : they were planned as C-400 and M-400, taking over the C-300 / M-300combo, with the styling of the L-550 for the C-400.

Both prototypes were presented at the march 1983 french Hi-Fi Fair but were revised quickly thereafter to become the M-02 and C-02, smaller siblings of the already available C-05and M-05.

Unlike the C-400 which changed a lot when becoming a C-02, the M-400 didn't change much to become the M-02 - see the Invisibilia section of TVK for the one (and only ?) image of it.

The M-02 however saw an intermediary version which landed in the catalogs as late as 1987 (!) but which wasn't produced : same design but large finish differences, better specifications and a tad more power in BTL mode, too - see Knobber images #5 and #6.

The M-02 was export-only but technically directly reminiscent of the ealier M-120A : onlynot bigger and with good old needle meters instead of flashy red LEDs.

The circuit is basically the same : Duo-ßeta,Duo-Alpha, plus-X power-supply and two Heat-Pipes.One crucial ingredient however changed : the450VA transformer is of the round core type :R-Core - quite uncommon in 1983.

Caps were upped to 2x 15,000µF and the structure was reorganized to visibly be dual-mono, the transformer and heat-pipes in symmetry near the front plate, drivers and output stages near the back plate.

Output can rise up to 300W in mono mode (Duo-Alpha) but with only one speaker terminal for both modes instead of the two of the M-120A - still plenty enough to go deaf rapidly.But beautifully.